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Many of us in the BC is digital money camp argued the case that more transactions and a lower transaction fee could be most easily implemented, within the spiri

by jgord 2y ago

Many of us in the BC is digital money camp argued the case that more transactions and a lower transaction fee could be most easily implemented, within the spirit of the founders intent, if we simply increased the size of the transaction buffer, mitigating an obvious bottleneck. We argued against the complexity of SegWit and Lightning Network. I think greed and politics won rather than engineering or economics good sense - people didnt want cheaper transactions, it now costs around $15 USD per BTC transaction. Despite the proliferation of alt-coins using essentially the same code-base, with shorter block-times and larger buffers.. and more programmability - ultimately proof-of-stake might be a better implementation of the block minting process, than proof-of-work.

bloatedGoat 2y ago
Transaction fees have been about as low as they can possibly be for months. It costs roughly $0.15 to move a UTXO right now. The people who argued for increasing the block size were making a tradeoff between decentralization and "low" transaction fees. Increasing the block size makes the chain grow faster which causes several problems: the time to sync new blocks goes up, initial chain download time goes way up, and block verification takes more CPU. The parameters were initially set so that anyone could run a full node for as many years as possible which is the most important part of the ecosystem by far. If you make it harder for the average person to run a node it doesn't matter how cheap the transactions are if ultimately a small group of people are capable of running it. You could argue that doubling or quadrupling the block size doesn't hurt decentralization, and maybe you're right, but that also doesn't move the needle much for transaction throughput either at least not enough to make a difference for adoption. Bitcoin can and should be scaled in layers. The detractors are just impatient.
- desumeku 2y ago
  While it's not here yet, Vitalik's future plans for Ethereum involve making it possible to run validators on smartwatches[1], which is far more accessibly decentralized than BTC could be and far more possible with Ethereum's PoS consensus as opposed to PoW, without needing to cripple transaction speed to boot. [1]: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/23/futures4.html https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/23/futures4.html
stevenwilkin 2y ago
It currently costs <1 USD to perform a Bitcoin transaction: https://bitcoinfees.net/ https://bitcoinfees.net/
jgord 2y ago
I did lookup the BTC transaction fee, but it looks like 15 USD was completely wrong .. my bad. Checking now : https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f... This says, afaict, the average BTC transaction cost today is $1:40 USD The 5yr chart shows it spiking at $128 in April 2024. If BTC transactions reliably cost 15c per transaction, it might make for a viable electronic money... but that is clearly not the case, so I think my point stands.

by jgord 2y ago

bloatedGoat 2y ago

Transaction fees have been about as low as they can possibly be for months. It costs roughly $0.15 to move a UTXO right now. The people who argued for increasing the block size were making a tradeoff between decentralization and "low" transaction fees. Increasing the block size makes the chain grow faster which causes several problems: the time to sync new blocks goes up, initial chain download time goes way up, and block verification takes more CPU. The parameters were initially set so that anyone could run a full node for as many years as possible which is the most important part of the ecosystem by far. If you make it harder for the average person to run a node it doesn't matter how cheap the transactions are if ultimately a small group of people are capable of running it. You could argue that doubling or quadrupling the block size doesn't hurt decentralization, and maybe you're right, but that also doesn't move the needle much for transaction throughput either at least not enough to make a difference for adoption. Bitcoin can and should be scaled in layers. The detractors are just impatient.

desumeku 2y ago
While it's not here yet, Vitalik's future plans for Ethereum involve making it possible to run validators on smartwatches[1], which is far more accessibly decentralized than BTC could be and far more possible with Ethereum's PoS consensus as opposed to PoW, without needing to cripple transaction speed to boot. [1]: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/23/futures4.html https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/23/futures4.html

stevenwilkin 2y ago

It currently costs <1 USD to perform a Bitcoin transaction: https://bitcoinfees.net/ https://bitcoinfees.net/

jgord 2y ago

I did lookup the BTC transaction fee, but it looks like 15 USD was completely wrong .. my bad. Checking now : https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f... This says, afaict, the average BTC transaction cost today is $1:40 USD The 5yr chart shows it spiking at $128 in April 2024. If BTC transactions reliably cost 15c per transaction, it might make for a viable electronic money... but that is clearly not the case, so I think my point stands.